John Wilson

I worked in audio for ten years. Audio is signal flow: what goes where, in what order, and what happens when a stage fails. So is software, and so is getting models to build it.

I'm the lead developer at Sessionwire. I designed the architecture and built the platform through two rebuilds to over 36,000 accounts. From 2024 I led a developer on the team. I also run index9 (opens in a new tab), a small Mac software studio. Kelowna, BC.

sessionwire, 2017 to now

An online studio for recording and mixing, now in its third version.

36,000+
accounts
100,000+
calls since 2023
200+
releases
1,300+
code changes merged (pull requests)
190,000+
lines of code
1,957
automated tests
  1. 2017: 1,011 commits
  2. 2018: 1,120 commits
  3. 2019: 160 commits
  4. 2020: 140 commits
  5. 2021: 1,278 commits
  6. 2022: 1,127 commits
  7. 2023: 1,268 commits
  8. 2024: 789 commits
  9. 2025: 899 commits
  10. 2026: 1,649 commits
Changes I saved to the code (commits) by year, about 9,400 in all. Development paused in 2019 and 2020.

The Sessionwire page has the history and the bigger pieces of work.

with AI models

Call rebuild
Seven releases in July 2026 that rebuilt how Sessionwire calls work. If your connection drops, you're put back in. In 8,143 calls from 14 July to 5 October 2026, nobody was left waiting alone for 5 minutes or more.
Triage
A tool that finds why something broke in Sessionwire and shows the evidence. It reads production records and changes nothing. It gave the right answer on 20 of 22 real past problems.
Search
Search inside Sessionwire that finds music by how it sounds and people by what they do. Describe a sound or a person, or drop in a track. It's free to use, and running it costs Sessionwire under $30 a month.
Remote control
Control of someone else's computer during a Sessionwire call, once they click Allow. A recording engineer can run the session on the other person's computer.
Firelight (opens in a new tab)
A YouTube channel of sleep stories. I built the software that makes them.

Every Firelight episode takes this path.

  1. researchClaude Opus
  2. writeClaude Opus
  3. gateI edit chapter one before any money is spent
  4. narrateKokoro, a voice model, on rented graphics cards
  5. renderas 10-bit HEVC on a Mac
  6. reviewsound and picture checks, then me

also

The Tascam Portastudio 488 rebuilt in the browser: eight channel strips, a cassette deck, level meters and transport keys.
A Tascam Portastudio 488, an 8‑track cassette recorder, that runs in the browser. Open the studio and press play.
8track
A Tascam Portastudio 488, an 8‑track cassette recorder, rebuilt for the browser.
Whetstone (opens in a new tab)
A Mac app from index9 that rewrites your rough prompt for the model you picked.
Windrose (opens in a new tab)
A Mac app from index9 that controls the fans on Apple Silicon Macs.

before

Ten years in audio: live sound in Canada and the UK, music for film and TV, and leading the audio engineering program at a Kelowna college. I left in 2015 to write software.

BA in Sound Technology from LIPA. MA from Middlesex, on remote multimedia collaboration.